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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

19 year old worker: I've been working since 1999. At this time, I am a casual worker in Lakhani shoes factory. I stay in a shanty on rent at 250 rupees. There is no electricity. And fearing raids of officials, the neighbors don't provide us with a connection, so we have to make due with a lamp. My duty is in general shift. I get up at 5:30 a.m. I have to go out to defecate in a very dirty place. Then I get in line for water. My friend is also a casual worker and now after the break sells vegetables on the street. Just after getting up, he runs to the vegetable market. After collecting water, I prepare food for both of us. To prepare roti and vegetables for two on the stove takes an hour. After preparing the food, I take a bath and then I eat.

I leave for duty at 8 a.m. on the bicycle. Attendance is marked first at the factory gate and then in the department. Work begins at 8:30 a.m. There is no break for tea but 9:30 tea comes from the canteen and one has to buy it with one's money and drink it while continuing to work. It is very laborious work. You have to be at it all the time- oil it, count it, then pack in boxes, load them on the vehicle. The supervisor continuously scolds and abuses us. In Lakhani shoes, there is not even time to drink water or go to the bathroom. One has to hide and go.

There is some relief during lunchtime. We eat together and talk. We want to leave this job but where can we go? Ideas keep churning in each one's mind. On the days I don't have time to make lunch, I eat in the canteen and they give an half plate for 4 rupees, but it does not fill my stomach. I have to spend 8 rupees. I am not able to send money home, nor am I able to live properly.

After lunch, we have to work continuously for 5 and half hours, and there is no tea coming around. It seems as though we have been tied up. There is no overtime work for me. On the release at 5 p.m., I come straight to my room and make tea. After tea, I sit here and there for some time. I collect water at 6:30 p.m. and clean the utensils. I prepare food at 7 p.m. My friend returns at 9 p.m. and then we make dinner. Sometimes, I watch t.v. We wash dishes and sleep by 10:30 p.m.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

(New Series No. 160, October 2001) In hierarchic social formations, normal or ordinary life is extremely dull, boring, and painful. People sitting on pyramids made of heads and shoulders apply the ointment of splendour over their pain. Those on the lower rungs of the ladder, those who are oppressed and crushed, it becomes compulsory for them to oppose-rebel at all times.

To keep them oppressed, to maintain their grip, texts and weapons are the instruments of those sitting on heads and shoulders. War and the Book (Ved, Bible, Quran, Constitution, Marxism, Anarchism) are two ends of the swamp. War and the Book are two events, great events. By chiselling events, literary figures and artists lay the basis for identity-politics and contribute to the creation of events for a long time.

Weapons and warriors of those sitting on heads and shoulders bloody us. Texts and intellectuals instigate us against one another for bloodshed. The essence of texts is: those who are sitting on heads and shoulders, those who are oppressing, exploiting you are doing all this for your own good.

In the present hierarchic social system, oppression, exploitation has now come forward in the institutional form. Instead of a particular person, we are confronted by faceless institutions. Through zig-zagged paths, it is being increasingly understood that the source of the pain of body-soul-conscience is formless and rooted in social relations and emancipation in the creation of a new society. This realization of the people has brought every form of government face-to-face with death. In this situation to postpone death, governments have reared-created terrorism.

The event in America, understood as the event, and the reactions of those sitting on heads and shoulders, it becomes irrelevant as to whether the massive destruction was self-caused or was gotten done by the State or a mixture of self-caused and got done. Educated propagandists through radio-television-newspapers-magazines have spread terrorism's fear-fame worldwide. A very good harvest of self-made and government-created terrorists is imminent. It looks like this harvest will for the time being fill the treasuries of bankrupt governments with the justifications of security-danger. And in the coming days, in every part of the world, there will be massive increase in government terror. A glimpse of attacks using terrorism as a shield is that immediately after the event, airline companies dismissed 100,000 workers.

For effective opposition of oppress-exploitation, it is necessary to make dysfunctional the weapons and blunt the texts of those sitting on our heads and shoulders. To bring into being a society in which there is no discrimination, premised on our being unequals, it is necessary to overcome weapon-text...